Eric Kim is a very prolific Street Photographer in the strict sense; he is a “fly on the wall”, taking candid photos of life on the street as he sees it. His website is HERE.

In a recent blog post, he gleans lessons from photographer Diane Arbus, who chronicled the lives of people marginalized by society. Kim’s blog states, “Diane Arbus is a photographer best known for her square-format photographs of marginalized people in society — including transgender people, dwarfs, nudists, circus people. Although she has always expressed love for her subjects, her work has always been controversial and critiqued heavily by art critics and the general public for simply being “the photographer of freaks” and casting her subjects in a negative light.”

His post cites 11 lessons to be gleaned from Arbus’ work. This is of great interest to me because she always engaged her subjects, as I do – there are no “hit and run” shots. Due to the nature of her work, the images sometimes make us uneasy. Ultimately she committed suicide, so they may have been uneasy for her to look at too. Nevertheless, I always think of her as having a humanistic approach to photography that I endeavor to emulate.